Max Black is dead, but his damned objection will
not lie down.
I suppose I had better back up a little.

1. Background

Back in the late 1950s, a wonderful thing happened
to metaphysics—and, derivatively, to other branches of philosophy, including
ethics and aesthetics. U.T. Place and J.J.C. Smart liberated us from
a stifling assumption about properties: that the identity of properties
requires synonymy of the terms that canonically express them.<1>
Place and Smart called our attention to scientific cases in which property
identities had been discovered empirically, or postulated as theoretical
hypotheses—now our old favorites: clouds and masses of water droplets,
lightning and electrical discharge, genes and segments of DNA molecules,
heat and molecular motion, water and H2O, gold and the element whose atomic
number is 79. Place and Smart thus opened the door to the wonderful
world of “contingent identity,” as they called it.
And with that came the antiCartesian, antiHumean
insight that the conceivable distinctness of properties does not show the
properties’ actual distinctness. P1 and P2 can be one and the same
property even though we can clearly conceive P1 apart from P2 and vice
versa.<2>
The idea of contingent identity soon ran afoul of
Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke.<3> Marcus had shown
that every genuine identity—in Kripke’s terms, every identity whose terms
are rigid designators—is necessary, not contingent. Applying this
insight to the sorts of scientific identities mentioned above, Kripke argued
that they are indeed necessary, even though they are a posteriori; Place
and Smart had simply mistaken a posteriority for contingency. (In
similarly antiPositivist style, Kripke argued further that there are contingent
truths that are known a priori, though as we shall see, that claim remains
highly disputed.) P1 and P2 can be necessarily one and the
same property even though we can clearly conceive either apart from the
other. This threatened to make conceivability irrelevant to modality,
and that threat was welcomed by those who were not only scientific realists
but modal realists and who had no sympathy for Positivist deflation.
The significance of a posteriori identity was that
it helped mightily with Quine’s project of draining philosophy of its then
extreme and militant a priorism, which had been institutionalized by the
Positivists and perpetuated by the Ordinary Language philosophers.
It helped to erode the boundaries between philosophical inquiry and scientific
inquiry and between philosophical truths and scientific truths. Further,
it helped philosophers turn to scientific developments and bring
them usefully and illuminatingly to bear on traditional philosophical problems,
in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology and
elsewhere. Philosophy has been happier, richer and more fruitful
ever since.
Place and Smart were at work on the mind-body problem
in particular. More specifically, they were addressing the nature
of sensations, because although each was then a Behaviorist both
officially and at heart, each granted that phenomenal sensory states constituted
what Place called an “intractable residue” that resisted behavioral analysis.
(Their Identity Theory of mind applied only to sensations; only a decade
later did Armstrong generalize it to all mental states and events.<4>)
On their view, a sensation was a posteriori identical with a neurophysiological
event. So much is familiar.
And it brings us up to Black’s Objection.
The objection turned specifically on a feature of a posteriori identity.
I quote in full Smart’s famous but cryptic formulation.<5>

[I]t may be possible to get out of asserting the existence
of irreducibly psychic processes, but not out of asserting the existence
of irreducibly psychic properties. For suppose we identify
the Morning Star with the Evening Star. Then there must be some properties
which logically imply that of being the Morning Star, and quite distinct
properties which entail that of being the Evening Star. Again, there
must be some properties (for example, that of being a yellow flash) which
are logically distinct from those in the physicalist story.

Smart’s equally famous solution: “topic-neutral translations”
of mental ascriptions. Smart contended that mental ascriptions are
topic-neutral, in the sense of entailing neither that the states and events
ascribed are nonphysical nor that they are physical. Smart sought
to show that mental ascriptions are topic-neutral by providing synonyms
or paraphrases of them that are both adequate as paraphrases and obviously
topic-neutral; “I see a yellowish-orange after-image” was rendered as “There
is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes
open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front
of me, that is, when I really see an orange.”
(Everyone seemed to find this entirely appropriate.
David Lewis and David Armstrong joined in and offered plainly topic-neutral
meaning analyses of their own, in causal terms. Michael Bradley,
Frank Jackson and other critics convincingly attacked Smart’s paraphrases.<6>
But both defense and attack seem to me misguided. Why should we expect
that for every English expression that is in fact topic-neutral, there
must also be a distinct English expression that is synonymous with the
first and that is more obviously topic-neutral? Moreover, in a controversial
case, non-entailment—hence, here, topic-neutrality—is the default.
The burden is on Smart’s opponent to show that mental ascriptions do entail
the existence of nonphysical items.<7> And, incidentally,
why should we expect philosophical analysis to produce greater consensus
in the case of mental ascriptions than it does in any other area?)
Whatever one’s views on topic-neutral translations,
Black’s general line of thought has not gone away. His descendants
include Saul Kripke, W.D. Hart, George Bealer, Stephen White and David
Lewis (!) as sympathizers, and most recently, Frank Jackson and David Chalmers.<8>
What the Black-inspired antimaterialist approaches have had in common is
the following structure. (1) A posteriori identities do not come
for free; certain conditions have to be met. (2) Those special conditions
are met in the standard cases of a posteriori identities. (3)
It is claimed that the special conditions are not met in the case
of phenomenal states and neurological or other physical states, because
of a special way in which the phenomenal term of the putative identity
is identified or conceived. (Conclusion: No a posteriori identity
for the phenomenal, hence either a priori identity or no identity at all;
in the latter case, property dualism ensues.)
In previous work I have rebutted the Kripkean version
of this type of argument.<9> My main target in the present
paper is Chalmers, who alongside Jackson has introduced a new and interesting
element: the appeal to Gareth Evans’ development of Kripke’s idea of the
contingent a priori.<10>

2. Jackson and Chalmers

Chalmers’ attack on materialism comes in several
different versions, that need to be distinguished and addressed individually.<11>
I shall focus on the one that is quite explicit in, and officially the
central version of, Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind.<12>
It is also strongly suggested by Jackson’s article “Armchair Metaphysics,”
though there the antimaterialist conclusion is not drawn. (If the
argument of “AM” is put together with Jackson’s famous earlier view that
phenomenal information is not a priori entailed even by the totality of
all relevant physical information,<13> antimaterialism does immediately
follow, but Jackson may have relinquished the earlier view. I think
“AM” on its own commits him to the weaker but still alarming thesis that
either materialism is false or an “analytical” form of materialism, such
as Analytical Behaviorism or “Analytical Functionalism,” is true.)
Chalmers’ official CM version is both the
clearest and the most accessible. Some of the criticisms I shall
make here will apply to the other versions as well, but not all of them
will; and some of the other versions incur objections to which this one
is not subject. Having said all that, for brevity I shall call my
target version just “the Jackson-Chalmers [J-C] argument.”
I must emphasize also that neither Jackson nor Chalmers
now stands by “the Jackson-Chalmers argument” in its entirety. Jackson
has, I believe, abandoned the attack on materialism, though not the argument’s
main materials. Chalmers prefers the version found in his “Materialism
and the Metaphysics of Modality” (op. cit.).<14>
So neither author’s current position is directly a target of my critique.
Rather, I think the critique is worth offering because of the J-C argument’s
clarity and accessibility aforementioned, and because it has been influential
and persuasive to some readers.
Here it is.

(1) If materialism is true, then every fact admits of
reductive explanation in physical terms.
(2) Reductive explanation of B-facts in terms of A-facts requires
the logical supervenience of B-facts on A-facts.
(3) There are phenomenal facts (e.g., facts of what it’s like
to experience such-and-such a sensation) that do not logically supervene
on any physical facts.
\ (4) There are phenomenal facts that do not admit of reductive
explanation in physical terms. [2,3]
\ (5) Materialism is not true. [1,4]
qed

“Reductive explanation” is “explanation wholly in terms
of simpler entities” (Chalmers, p. 42). It is less clear what “logical”
or (p. 34) “conceptual” supervenience is, though it is pointedly a stronger
relation than what we think of as merely ordinary metaphysical supervenience,
i.e., the metaphysical though a posteriori determination of macroscopic
facts by lower-level facts; in “CARE” Jackson and Chalmers insist that
it is a priori.
The obvious candidate is supervenience in virtue
of logic plus linguistic meaning, which would be a priori; one might require
in-principle deducibility. Both Jackson and Chalmers explicitly deny that
they mean derivability in any system of formal logic alone, so the obvious
candidate is, more specifically, derivability in some logical calculus
given analytic definitions or at least one-way conceptual truths.
And that is how Jackson talks in “AM.” (In FMTE Jackson talks
of “concepts,” but those do not seem to differ from word meanings.)
Chalmers says that “the constraints are largely conceptual” (p. 35), but
officially defines “logical supervenience” in terms of “logically possible
worlds” and does not commit himself to the foregoing conception.
For both Jackson and Chalmers, conceptual relations are to be established
by the traditional method of consulting intuitions about hypothetical examples.
Officially, Jackson and Chalmers say merely that
the derivation must be a priori, and in “CARE” (p. 338) they add that they
“would prefer that the notion [of conceivability] be cast in the more general
terms of a priori reasoning rather than explicit deduction”; but if they
have in mind any derivational materials or style other than the ones I
have just mentioned, they have not said. N.b., I assume that the
intuitions appealed to must be semantic in some sense. At least,
for a reason that will emerge below, they cannot be merely modal, even
if modal intuitions themselves count as a priori.

3. Premise (2)

Premise (1) seems all right for now, though we shall
question it later on. But (2) seems outrageous. First, few
macroscopic terms bear any sort of conceptual or otherwise a priori connection
to the vocabulary of microphysics. “Raven”; “writing-desk”; “Alice
Liddell”; “novel”; “library”; “novelist”; “occupation”; “dollar”; “debt”;
“recession”; “shoe store”; “salesperson”; “boss”; “chairperson”; “committee”;
“art gallery”; “dinner party”—what conceivable conceptual connections could
those notions bear to “quark,” “lepton,” “spin,” or the numbers characterizing
microquantities and trajectories?
Second, as we now know, the Positivists’ dream of
bridge laws and type-reduction of the special sciences to microphysics
was a dream only; the special sciences gerrymander natural kinds in very
different and cross-cutting ways at their respective levels of nature.
There are rough type-reductions of classical chemical kinds to physics,
but none of any higher-level kinds. (Not that either Jackson or Chalmers
has Positivistically suggested otherwise. My point is only to cite
one reason why there are no conceptual connections between the macro- and
the micro-.)
Third, there are the standard examples of a posteriori
natural-kind identity. No amount of information about chemistry,
including detailed information about H2O, a priori entails anything about
water, since it was an empirical discovery that water is H2O.
Of course, Jackson and Chalmers have defended (2).<15>
Their main arguments are four:
(A) A direct appeal to conceivability.
Chalmers (p. 73) says,

A world physically identical to ours, but in which…[macroscopic]
facts differ, is inconceivable…in principle. Even a superbeing,
or God, could not imagine such a world. There is simply not anything
for them to imagine…. A physically identical world in which the high-level
facts are false is therefore logically impossible, and the high-level properties
are logically supervenient on the physical.<16>

(B) Otherwise the supervenience would be “an impenetrable
mystery” (Jackson (1994), p. 32). Supervenience is remarkable and
needs explaining. The obvious explanation of a metaphysical necessity
would be that it was a logical or conceptual necessity; if it is not one
of those, why is it necessary at all?<17>
(C) Otherwise “there will always be a further
unanswered question: Why is this lower-level process accompanied by the
phenomenon?” (Chalmers, CM, p. 48). Levine (op. cit.) makes
much of this also.
(D) All the uncontentious B-facts, considered
category by category, do logically supervene on microphysics. In
the closing section of his Chapter 2, Chalmers runs through a number of
“problem cases” and variously tries to make this plausible.
N.b., in adjudicating (2) and related issues, it
will be a ground rule that at least logic and truths by virtue of meaning
are a priori. Even if one is a Quinean skeptic about the a priori
and truth by virtue of meaning, the soundness of the J-C argument in particular
should not stand or fall with all-out Quinean skepticism.

4. Three ways of deriving B-statements from A-statements

There are three strategies available for moving a
priori upward from microphysics.
First, some non-ordinary macroscopic concepts can
be directly defined in microphysical terms. A macroscopic object’s
mass can (perhaps) be calculated from the properties of its gabillions
of component particles. In “CARE,” Jackson and Chalmers contend that,
similarly, one could calculate that such-and-such regions of spacetime
are occupied by macroscopic objects of certain shapes. (I shall grant
that contention for the sake of argument, but I am not sure it is true.
“Object” in the macroscopic sense is not a term of microphysics; perhaps
all that one could calculate is that the relevantly shaped regions are
occupied by comparatively dense collections of particles.)
Second, some macroscopic and intermediate-level
terms may have functional analyses. The analyses need not be complete
and explicit. It would be enough for Jackson and Chalmers’ purpose
if there is so much as one conceptually sufficient lower-level condition
for the term’s application, even a complicated disjunctive one. The
idea would be that some lower-level description might be a disjunct of
the functional analysans, and so the higher-level functional description
could be derived a priori from it. Chalmers suggests the examples
of biological reproduction (p. 43), heat (pp. 44-45), and learning (p.
47).
The third strategy is Jackson’s and Chalmers’ distinctive
contribution to the Black lineage. It is designed to deal with natural-kind
terms, the leading obvious obstacle to a priori derivation of macroscopic
facts from microphysics. The idea, following Evans (op. cit.), is
that following the empirical discovery of a natural kind’s underlying scientific
nature, an a priori upward derivation becomes available by dint of a rigidified
reference-fixer for the kind term in question. This takes a bit of
explaining.
The kind term must have at least one macroscopic
reference-fixing property, for the familiar reason that ordinary speakers
can use the term competently without knowing the underlying nature that
it designates. So for a term such as “water,” we can assign its referent
stuff a characteristic role that is expressed by descriptions used to fix
the term’s reference; call that role, trivially, “the ‘water’ role.”
Water is the stuff that falls from the sky as rain, that fills the lakes
and rivers, that comes out of the tap, that we drink a great deal of, etc.
(As always in our Kripkean times, it is emphasized that this role is not
taken to fix the sense of the term, but only to identify the substance
being mentioned.)
Now, according to Jackson and Chalmers (again following
Evans), it is true a priori that the actual occupant of the “water”
role is water. Of course it is also contingent, not necessary, that
water (H2O) occupies the “water” role; water might have done none of the
things described by its actual reference-fixers. But since those
reference-fixers do fix reference in the actual world, we know without
further investigation that whatever satisfies them is water, whatever the
underlying nature of water might be. If we are actually calamitously
mistaken and water is really XYZ rather than H2O, we still know that water
occupies the “water” role. Compare Kripke’s well-known standard meter
example: Since it was true by stipulation that a “meter” was
the length of the designated stick in Paris, one could know a priori that
that stick was (very) exactly one meter long, even if its being so was
a contingent fact and no matter what the length of the stick was independently
of metric.
And that distinctive sort of (allegedly) a priori
truth affords an upward derivational strategy for natural-kind concepts.
If we know empirically that H2O is what actually occupies the “water” role
and we know a priori that the actual occupant of the “water” role is water,
we can infer a priori by transitivity that H2O and water are one.
(Of course, in the context of a whole derivation of some fact about water
from microphysics, we would also have had to show that the empirical fact
that H2O occupies the “water” role is itself a priori derivable from microphysics,
presumably by way of the analysans that describes the “water” role itself.)
And now we do get sample derivations of macroscopic
facts about water. One such actual fact cost me considerable money,
trouble and distress several years ago. Here is what the closing
portion of its J-C derivation might look like.

...

A 30.48-cm-high subregion of [such-and-such a spatiotemporal region, in
fact my attic] is occupied by H2O.

\ The attic has a foot of H2O in it.

H2O = the actual occupant of the “water” role.
[Established empirically, but (supposedly) derivable from microphysics
via functional definition of the role description]

The actual occupant of the “water” role = water.
[Contingent but known a priori]

\ The attic has a foot of water in it. [Substituting identicals]
qed

5. Evans’ examples and their ilk

Evans developed his notion of the contingent a priori
in part through Kripke’s notion of reference-determining stipulation.
Suppose someone stipulates, “Let us use ‘Julius’ to refer to whoever [actually]
invented the zip.” Then, “Julius invented the zip” is known a priori,
or rather, “(If anyone uniquely invented the zip) Julius invented the zip”
is. But also, “(If there is one and only one actual F) the actual
F is the F” is always true, and known a priori. Likewise “(If there
is a unique occupant of the ‘K’ role) the actual occupant of the ‘K’ role
is K.”
Assuming Evans was right, his contingent a priori
truths were generated by the mechanisms of reference. “Julius invented
the zip” is known a priori because it was stipulated that “Julius” refers
to whoever did actually invent the zip. There are many other examples
of contingent truths known a priori in virtue of the mechanisms of reference:

All those are contingent a priori in the same way: Each
is such that, given the linguistic conditions on the contextual reference
of terms, it must be true. But it should be noted that this is a
fairly superficial phenomenon. “I am here now” must be true when
uttered merely because “I” conventionally refers in context to the speaker,
while “here” and “now” refer respectively to the place and time of the
utterance.<18> I shall make more of this point below.
Now finally we may begin an assessment of the J-C
argument.

6. First objection: Premise (1)

Let us return for a moment to premise (1).
(1) is far from obvious. In fact, as it stands it is clearly false,
refuted by the sorts of perspectival facts that are stated in terms of
indexicals. Even if Jackson and Chalmers are right in holding that
William G. Lycan’s weight can be deduced from microphysics, one cannot
so deduce, or in any other way reductively explain, that I weigh 195 pounds;
indeed, that fact cannot be reductively explained by any body of objective
fact. The indexical is, as John Perry said, essential.<19>
(Someone, including an amnesic myself, could know that WGL weighs 195 pounds
but not know that I do, and that person would not be able to work out the
connection a priori even though it is metaphysically necessary.)
Likewise for “The meeting will begin twenty minutes from now,” “The meeting
will be held in this room,” and so on.
Jackson and Chalmers are well aware of such indexical
facts. In “CARE” (p. 318) they qualify (1) by adding “locating information”
to the microphysical supervenience base, the equivalent of a “You are here”
marker for whatever sort of indexical one might think up. Chalmers
argues that the need for such an addition will give no comfort to the materialist,
because no such patch is available for the case of phenomenal facts:

The indexical fact may have to be taken as primitive.
If so, then we have a failure of reductive explanation distinct from and
analogous to the failure with consciousness. Still, the failure is
less worrying than that with consciousness, as the unexplained fact is
so ‘thin’ by comparison to the facts about consciousness in all its glory.
Admitting this primitive indexical fact would require far less revision
of our materialist worldview than would admitting irreducible facts about
conscious experience.

In response, let me just record my own more general
objection to (1).<20> I agree with the (somewhat
controversial) thesis that there are distinctively phenomenal facts, as
revealed by Jackson’s Knowledge argument.<21> And I agree
that, for each of two reasons, those facts cannot be reductively explained.
The first reason is that they are in part indexical facts, though that
part would be taken care of by Jackson and Chalmers’ “locating information”
move. The second reason is that the phenomenal facts are ineffable.
One knows them from the inside, under special introspective modes of presentation
(“There’s one of those semanthas again”), and the representations
in question are not synonymous with expressions of any public natural language,
actual or possible. What is ineffable cannot be explained at all;
at the very least, the introspective representations are not going to be
deducible from microphysics or even from neuroscience or from any other
body of public information expressed in public notation. Yet all
of this is not only compatible with materialism but is positively predicted
by my favorite form of materialism.<22> So materialism
does not require reductive explanation of phenomenal facts.<23>

6. Second objection: Premise (2) again

Since Jackson and Chalmers have defended (2), we
must answer each of their four arguments surveyed in section 3 above.
Rebuttal to (A), the direct appeal to conceivability:
So far as I can see, the intuition expressed in the quotation from CM
is just the modal supervenience or necessitation intuition, not one that
is semantic in any sense. Yes, of course we cannot imagine a world
physically identical to ours but in which the ordinary macroscopic facts
differ, nor could God do so. All parties to the present dispute agree
that the ordinary-macroscopic supervenes on the microscopic. It simply
does not follow that a physically identical world in which the higher-level
facts do not obtain is “logically” or a priori impossible as opposed to
merely impossible.<24>
Rebuttal to (B), the fear of “impenetrable mystery”:
Like David Papineau, Block and Stalnaker and no doubt many others,<25>
I hold that the supervenience of a macroscopic property on the microscopic
setup with which it is identical (or by which it is constituted) needs
no further explanation than the identity/constitution claim. Identities
and constitutings do not call for or even admit explanation, not even when
they are a posteriori. Why is water H2O? It just is.
Why is Red Watson Richard A. Watson? Why is this particular table
constituted by an old packing case? Such questions neither need nor
have answers.
Jackson and Chalmers reject this view, and try to
refute it.

[T]his seems to conflate ontological and epistemological matters.
Identities are ontologically primitive, but they are not epistemically
primitive. Identities are typically implied by underlying truths
that do not involve identities. (“CARE,” p. 354)

(Jackson and Chalmers go on to motivate the claim expressed by the third
sentence.)
Of course a posteriori identities are not “epistemically
primitive”; that is why they are called “a posteriori.” It does not
follow that they can be explained. Further, suppose Jackson and Chalmers
were right in contending that macroscopic identities are a priori implied
by underlying truths. It still would not follow that they are thereby
explained; a well-known lesson of the literature on deductive-nomological
explanation is that entailment does not suffice for explanation.<26>
Rebuttal to (C), the desire not to leave questions
unanswered: (i) By this standard, there probably has never been an
actual reductive explanation in real science, and almost as probably never
will be. Real explanations almost never answer the entire question.
Toy examples in Newtonian physics do, but quantum-mechanical, biological,
geological, and certainly meteorological explanations do not. Quantum-mechanical
explanations are probabilistic; and special-science explanations rest too
heavily on idealizations and are too vulnerable to lower-level hardware
breakdowns.
(ii) See again the rebuttal to (B); identity and
constitution claims, in particular, cannot themselves be explained.
There is the appearance of an explanatory gap, but there is neither mystery
nor any answerable identity or constitution question left unanswered.
Rebuttal to (D), the survey of B-facts: (i)
There are categories of B-fact for which logical supervenience prima facie
fails. One is that of indexical facts, though that category is accommodated
by Jackson and Chalmers’ “locating information” move. Another is
that of negative facts, though Jackson and Chalmers deal with that by adding
a “That’s all” clause to the supervenience base. A third is that
of singular facts stated using proper names; here Chalmers appeals (p.
84) to private and time-bound reference-fixers within individual subjects
(cf. “CARE,” p. 327). A fourth is that of intentional facts; Chalmers
responds (p. 82) that either intentional facts themselves require irreducible
phenomenal facts or some version of “Analytical Functionalism” is true
of them (of course, it is possible that intentional facts are simply irreducible
in their own right). Chalmers might be correct in each case,
but the point for now is that he is forced to take a number of tendentious
and controversial positions in philosophy of language and philosophy of
mind.
(ii) Even if we abstain from radical Quinean skepticism
about analyticity and the a priori, there is no reason to think that scientific
reduction via even partial a priori functional definitions ever happens
or is even possible. Here I have in mind Hilary Putnam’s position
in “The Analytic and the Synthetic,”<27> according to which although
there are analytic truths of several sorts, based on logic, on stipulations,
or on simple and nontechnical “one-criterion” concepts such as “brother”
or “bachelor,” science does not afford analyticities. Even if a scientific
term has been introduced by stipulation (Putnam’s example is the Newtonian
“definition” of kinetic energy“e = ½mv2”), the resulting
statement is hostage to holistic concerns of theory and is subject to revision
if the theory as a whole meets with recalcitrant empirical phenomena.
Similarly, even if some macroscopic kinds are functional kinds, one cannot
know that a priori, but only in the context of a body of theory that collectively
faces what Quine called the tribunal of experience.<28>
A further reason is the prevalence of idealization
at each level of nature. Rarely is there a smooth fit between a reduced
concept and the constellation of lower-level reducing entities;<29>
even if truths about the lower level did a priori entail something about
the upper level, what they would entail would not be that the reduced concept
applies, but only some more complex fact still expressed in lower-level
terms (to which the reduced concept somehow approximates by idealization).
A still further reason is that scientific natural
kinds tend to be underlying-nature kinds rather than functional kinds.
Of course, Jackson and Chalmers have provided a separate means of dealing
with the crucial case of a posteriori identities. But I shall now
argue that Jackson-Chalmers derivations are fallacious.

7. Obstructing J-C derivations

Obstruction 1 (a rerun): A J-C derivation requires
a reduction via a priori partial functional definitions (e.g., of the “‘water’
role” and of each of its sub-roles). But as before, there is no reason
to think that such reductions are available.
Obstruction 2: Why should we think that a
natural-kind term has a public role-stereotype such as “the ‘water’ role”?
Such roles are supposed to be constituted by reference-fixing descriptions;
the relevant kind term would have to have a distinctive and stable set
of reference-fixers. But we have been given no good reason to accept
that presupposition. Reference-fixers are at best idiosyncratic,
usually private to speakers, and transitory even for individual speakers.<30>
For that reason, it seems to me most unlikely that there is any “‘water’
role.”
Of course, philosophers have had no trouble coming
up with sets of stereotypical reference-fixers for terms like “water,”
such as those I mentioned above. There is a loose body of information
about water that we 21st-century Americans share, which seems to
constitute a “‘water’ role.” But there being that body of information
is a highly contingent fact. First, no one such description is essential.
One could still have the word “water” explained to one even if there were
no lakes and even if there were no taps, by reference to some other mode
of acquaintance with water. In fact, even the collective body of
all the reference-fixers that have been mentioned in the Putnam literature
is inessential; under unusual circumstances, the word “water” could still
be explained to one even if there were no lakes and no taps and no rain
and no drinking and no colorless liquid and and and..., so long as there
were real or imaginary water around doing something or being some way.
(Perhaps all we know of water is that it is whatever stuff makes the trickling
sound we hear in our cave.) And “water” would still mean just what
it does now, in real-world English.<31>
Obstruction 3: Jackson and Chalmers have failed
to show that the key premise in a J-C derivation (e.g., “The actual occupant
of the ‘water’ role = water”) is really known a priori.
So far as I can see, the claim that it is known a priori rests on a use-mention
fallacy. Viz., as has been pointed out by Keith Donnellan and by
Simon Blackburn,<32> referential a prioritude does not survive
disquotation. Take the simple example first: Although you know
a priori that “I am here now” as uttered by me is true, you do not know
a priori that I am here now; for the latter knowledge you need perception
and memory.<33> Nor, for the same reason, do I know a priori
that I am here now. I do not know a priori that Julius invented the
zip, or even that if anyone uniquely did, he did; we do not know a priori
that Dave is called “Dave.”
And similarly, we do not know a priori that the
actual occupant of the “water” role = water (i.e., H2O).
That had to be discovered empirically, and we know it through testimony.
Without J-C derivations, the J-C argument collapses,
for natural-kind concepts were its admittedly biggest obstacle. (2)
remains unsupported.

8. Third objection: Premise (3)

Suppose the J-C derivations were sound (i.e., ignore
the three obstructions). Then why might not a parallel derivation
work for a phenomenal concept?
Choose any plausible public reference-fixer for
the type of sensation I am having. E.g., use an Armstrong-Lewis-style
role description: Stinging pain is the state of an organism that
is typically caused by stinging, and that typically causes a wish not to
have been in it, distraction from whatever one had been thinking about,
and pain behavior such as jerking the injured part and saying “ouch.”
But rigidify that description using “actual”; then use it in a J-C premise:
“The actual occupant of the ‘stinging pain’ role = stinging
pain.” Barring the three obstructions, why should the relevant J-C
derivation not go through?
Chalmers will complain that phenomenal concepts
are not a priori role concepts. (That is his whole point,
of course: that phenomenal concepts are unique or nearly so in not a priori
being role concepts.) So in particular he would deny that “stinging
pain” is one. And I emphatically agree that phenomenal concepts are
not a priori flaccid role concepts; I am no friend of “Analytical
Functionalism.” But for Jackson and Chalmers’ purpose they do not
need to be flaccid role concepts. Chalmers argues that they are not
a priori role concepts of any kind (pp. 104-06).<34>
I agree that phenomenal concepts are not a priori
role concepts, but that is because (as above) I do not think that any theoretically
interesting concepts are a priori role concepts or indeed a priori
anything. I do not see that this distinguishes phenomenal concepts
from natural-kind concepts.<35> In particular, if Chalmers
is right in contending that most or at least many concepts can be a priori
role concepts without being at all obviously so, then all the more would
it be possible that phenomenal concepts are such.
It may be that the sort of phenomenal concept Chalmers
has in mind is that of a quale in a strict sense of that term that
in previous works I have tried to isolate;<36> examples include
the color of an after-image, for that matter the color of a single patch
in one’s veridical visual field, the pitch or the volume of a heard sound,
the phenomenal smell of a smell, and the characteristic property of a tactile
sensation (smooth, rough, liquid). Chalmers certainly holds that
such properties are not functionally definable, and as a matter of fact
I agree that they are not even a posteriori identical with functional properties.<37>
But it does not follow that they are not relational, nor that they are
not relationally definable. I believe they are relational: They are
representational properties of experiences; veridically or not, the experiences
represent external objects as having this property or that.<38>
Accordingly, they have a relational psychosemantics.<39>
If that is correct, then the terms that designate them would have reference-fixers
of the sort that Jackson and Chalmers elevate into “roles.”

To conclude: I see no reason to accept any
of the J-C argument’s premises. The argument fails. Whether
one of its descendants may succeed remains to be seen.

4 A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1968).

5 Op. cit., p. 148. Footnote 13 reads, “I think this objection
was first put to me by Professor Max Black. I think it is the most
subtle of any of those I have considered, and the one which I am least
confident of having satisfactorily met.”

11 This diversity accounts for an otherwise odd phenomenon I have
observed in the literature: that several recent critiques of Jackson-Chalmers
seem to be talking about quite different arguments. Two versions
appear in Chalmers’ CM, and another in Chalmers’ “Materialism and
the Metaphysics of Modality” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
59: 473-96). A newer one is nearly explicit in Jackson and Chalmers’
joint article, “Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation,” Philosophical
Review 110, 3 (July, 2001), 315-60 (“CARE”). (And cf. Jackson,
From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), FMTE.)

12 Chapter 4, section 1. Alternately, one might read Chalmers
as merely softening up his readers before moving on to the more technical
and perhaps more powerful argument of Chapter 4, section 2, that mobilizes
the ideas of “primary” and “secondary” intensions taken over from a species
of two-dimensional modal logic, especially since Jackson goes on to make
a similar appeal in FMTE. But in “CARE,” they say that that
apparatus “plays only a clarifying role, in removing certain confusions
that may arise from the presence of a posteriori necessary connections,
and in providing a convenient shorthand for discussing the patterns by
which a concept applies to the world” (p. 338).

16 Chalmers goes on to add an epistemological argument for logical
supervenience, but I do not understand it at all.

17 That is why the intuitions on which the bottom-up derivations
rest must be in some sense semantic rather than merely modal. Modal
supervenience intuitions cannot be taken as epistemologically primitive,
but are to be explained by the semantic.

18 I ignore the sometimes important fact that such pragmatic rules
of reference or Kaplanian “character” are riddled with exceptions; “I”
does not always refer to the speaker, nor “here” and “now” to the place
or time of utterance.
Evans’ terminology, in distinguishing contingent
a priori statements of the present kind from what we normally think of
as necessary truths, was perverse, and I cannot help but think it has been
pernicious. He called truths of the foregoing type “deep” necessities,
precisely as opposed to “superficial” (i.e., genuine) necessities.
Cf. also M. Davies and L. Humberstone, “Two Notions of Necessity,” Philosophical
Studies 38 (1980), pp.1-30.

19 “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs
13: 3-21. The phenomenon was originally elaborated by Hector Castañeda
(“‘He’: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness,” Ratio 8 (1966):
130-57), though it goes back at least to Peter Geach (“On Belief about
Oneself,” Analysis 18 (1957): 23-24).
.
20 I have not the space to rehearse the arguments here.
They are found in Chapter 3 of my Consciousness and Experience
(Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1996); see also “Perspectival
Representation and the Knowledge Argument,” in Q. Smith and A.Jokic (eds.),
Consciousness:
New Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), though
that printing has been superseded (and in part contradicted) by a longer
version.

21 “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” loc. cit., following but improving
upon T. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review
82 (1974): 435-56 (which in turn followed B. Farrell, “Experience,” Mind
59 (1950): 170-98).

22 See again Chapter 3 of my Consciousness and Experience,
loc. cit.

23 In correspondence, Chalmers has suggested that framing the
argument in terms of reductive explanation was inessential and raised distracting
issues about science (for one of which, see the next section). That
may be so, but the alternative is to go straight from materialism to logical
supervenience, and I do not see how that conditional might otherwise be
defended. Perhaps argument (A) from section 3 above qualifies, but
see my rebuttal of (A) two paragraphs from here.

24 In “Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap”
(Philosophical Review 108 (1999): 1-46), Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker
have offered what seem to be nontendentious and convincing counterexamples
to the claim that microscopic facts without the supervening macroscopic
facts are inconceivable (p. 8). But Jackson and Chalmers resist them
(“CARE,” pp. 338-40).

26 Examples that show this include those of Bromberger’s flagpole,
the eclipse, the barometer, the hexed salt, and the birth-control pills.
For a summary, see W. Salmon, “Four Decades of Scientific Explanation,”
in P. Kitcher and W. Salmon (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, Vol. XIII: Scientific Explanation (University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), pp. 46-50.

28 In “AM” Jackson anticipates, and in “CARE” Jackson and Chalmers
address, this holist response. They reply to a similar point of Block
and Stalnaker’s as follows (pp. 343-44)

Block and Stalnaker do not say anything…to argue against an
opponent who holds that these conditions of application to various epistemic
possibilities are as much a (tacit) part of the concept of ‘water’ as the
conditions of application brought out in the Gettier literature are a (tacit)
part of the concept of “knowledge.” It should also be noted that
even if these conditions of application are not part of the semantics of
“water” in English, this does not entail that a subject’s application of
the term to epistemic possibilities is not justified a priori…. [I]t
may be the case that the relevant conditionals involving a term may vary
as between users of a term (so that the corresponding conditions of application
are not built in to the term’s semantics in English), but that each user’s
knowledge of the conditionals is justified a priori all the same.

The first point is correct: Block and Stalnaker
have not specifically argued against the view that the application conditions
of “water” (or of “kinetic energy”) are a priori in the same way as are
the (partial) application conditions of “S knows that P.” But on
their face the scientific examples do not seem to be approachable from
the armchair in the same way as is that of knowledge. Jackson and
Chalmers concede an important difference, that in the scientific cases
“general empirical background knowledge” must be invoked, but they continue
to insist that the relevant application conditions must contain a separable
a priori component that dictates the sort of empirical information that
is to be consulted. Of course, this separability is just what Putnam
denies, and Jackson and Chalmers have given no real positive argument for
it either. The present issue is at best in stalemate.
The second point made in the foregoing passage,
that an analogue of a J-C derivation could be run on the private thoughts
of an individual subject at a time, may be correct as well, but it takes
us beyond the scope of this paper. (I would make a different Quinean
objection to such an analogue.)

30 In “CARE,” Jackson and Chalmers grant that. And
in conversation, Chalmers has said that he would now prefer to run the
argument in terms of mental concepts rather than in terms of public natural-language
expressions.

31 In saying that, I am not begging the question by insisting
that “water” means H2O, period. I mean only that “water” would mean
what it does now, whatever that is, even if its reference were fixed, in
some context, by descriptions entirely different from the usual ones.)

33 I am assuming that “I,” “here” and “now” are directly referential
terms, and of course that the relevant T-sentences are empirical rather
than a priori.

34 That is a second reason why the intuitions on which the bottom-up
derivations rest must be semantic rather than merely modal. Many
of us have modal supervenience intuitions about phenomenal facts; I suspect
even Descartes might have granted that phenomenal facts supervene metaphysically
on the physical. So the alleged difference that distinguishes the
phenomenal must be that its supervenience is only modal not not (again
broadly) semantic.

35 Which does not entail that phenomenal kinds are natural kinds,
though I believe they are natural kinds of a recognizable sort.